More Young People Watch DJ Khaled’s Snapchat than America’s Highest-Rated Show

In a recent article on the power of Snapchat, Bloomberg revealed that DJ Khaled, one of Snapchat’s heaviest hitters, has a bigger millennial audience than The Big Bang Theory, TV’s #1 show.

“The other day the grass was brown, its green cuz i ain’t give up. Never surrender.”

“Khaled’s videos attract 3 million to 4 million viewers each. Given how Snapchat skews overwhelmingly tween to late-millennial, that means about the same number of young people that are watching him admire flowers are watching the biggest network sitcoms. According to Nielsen, roughly 3.3 million people age 12-34 watch The Big Bang Theory.”

To put things in perspective, The Big Bang Theory pays each of its three main actors an astounding $1,000,000 per episode. Khaled, on the other hand, gets out of bed at 11 a.m. and films himself eating sausage or riding his Jet Ski. “They don’t want you to eat breakfast,” he tells his audience each morning in bumbling tones that are sometimes inaudible due to him stuffing his mouth with egg whites and turkey sausage.

According to Bloomberg, advertisers are struggling to reach anyone under their 30s. And the fact that the abominable snowman armed with a $500 phone and some funny one-liners can attract more millennial viewers than one of TV’s most popular show (which has a $100m+ budget) is, put lightly, kind of scary.

“The audiences of CBS, NBC, and ABC are, on average, in their 50s,” Bloomberg explained. “Cable networks such as CNN and Fox News have it worse, with median viewerships near or past Social Security age. MTV’s median viewers are in their early 20s, but ratings have dropped in recent years.”

LIONNNN!!!

When Snapchat reached out to legacy media companies like CBS and NBC, as well as some of the world’s largest ad agencies, many of them don’t even know where to start.

“I’ll be honest, I had no idea what they were talking about half the time,” one ad exec said about a Snapchat training session. Because of this, “marketers are understandably anxious, and [Snapchat’s CEO] and his deputies have capitalized on those anxieties brilliantly by charging hundreds of thousands of dollars when Snapchat introduces an ad product.”

What’s even more amazing is that Khaled hadn’t even heard of Snapchat 12 months ago…

I’ve gotta hand it to DJ Khaled. Like it or not, he’s single handedly changing the game and making legacy media companies freak out. Guess he really is “da best.”

What do you all think? Personally, I rarely use Snapchat. I’m 26 years old, so right in the target demographic, but just haven’t taken to it. Let me know in the comments! And as always, subscribe to The Hustle for more business goodness like this.

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